Potato-based and/or other farinaceous-based sheeted and baked, low-fat snacks are popular due to a growing consumer awareness of caloric intake and a general knowledge that fats and oils contribute largely to a food's overall caloric value, including snack foods. It is through this growing consumer demand for less oily foods that baked snacks, including potato-based and other farinaceous-based, sheeted snacks, have been developed. An example of one type of baked snack is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,500,240, wherein a sheeted farinaceous-based dough is sheeted to a prescribed thickness, cut into desired shapes, and baked to a moisture of less than 4%, yielding a low-fat snack chip having a blistered appearance and crisp texture.
Generally, sheeted and baked snack chips are produced from sheeting dough composed of farinaceous-based materials, such as potato flakes, or other materials such as wheat flour, corn flour, and other minor ingredients such as emulsifiers. Potato-based farinaceous materials and/or other farinaceous-based materials are blended with water in a suitable mixer such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,013,234. After re-hydration, the resulting dough is sheeted through a multi-station sheeting system as commonly used in the biscuit industry, or a single-station sheeting system as commonly used in the fabricated snack chip industry. The resulting sheet has a thickness between 0.4 mm to 2.0 mm, more commonly 0.6 mm to 1.0 mm, and a width as applicable to the baking system. The dough pieces generally are cut from the dough sheet in a “no scrap” pattern so that only narrow strips of dough along the edges of the sheet and/or between the cut dough pieces are returned to the mixer as usable scrap, leaving the remainder of the cut sheet, up to 98%, to be processed into finished product.
After cutting, the sheeted and cut dough pieces are transferred into a baking/drying oven that uses impingement, direct-fired, or convection-type heating. This baking/drying oven generally features a flat or nearly flat moving band to carry the separate pieces through one or more baking chambers, producing a baked snack chip of a desired moisture, usually between 1.0% and 3.0% by weight. After baking, the snack chips drop off the moving band onto a take-out conveyor, and can be lightly sprayed with edible oil, then seasoned and packaged in flexible material, such as foil-laminated polypropylene. Sheeted and baked chips could also be packaged in cylindrical canisters or other sleeve-type containers, although such chips are not stackable therein due to their random and irregular shape (warping) caused by uneven moisture loss during baking. This is well known in the industry and is due to normally occurring variations in sheeted dough density and concomitant variations in drying time of the various densities of dough in the sheet.
Sheeted, baked snack chips made from farinaceous-based materials offer consumers low oil/fat content, generally 10% or less by weight, as compared to fried chips, which typically have some 32% to 42% oil by weight. They have consistent quality through the use of consistent quality raw materials and a continuous processing system.
Unlike current baked, sheeted, snack chips that are not stackable, stackable fried snack chips offer enhanced flavor, improved product presentation through style of packaging, convenience of storage, and longer shelf-life by way of integrity of packaging materials, especially when packed in nitrogen flushed, hermetic, composite fiber canisters. They are one of the fastest growing segments today within the international snack food industry. Such fried chips generally are manufactured by processing individual dough blanks in cooking oil such that they float up against a top mold, resulting in a chip with the curved shape of the top mold. However, they may also be made by frying chain-linked dough sandwiched between a top and a bottom mold, as set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 3,905,255. Without a top mold, the dough blanks would simply float off the bottom molds once they entered the frying oil and the ability to shape and guide the chips would be lost. In addition, the double-mold configuration has limited the thickness of dough blanks that practically may be used on fryers.
It thus is seen that baked and fried snack food chips each have their desirable and undesirable features. Baked chips have low oil and fat content but generally are not stackable and have limited flavor, product presentation, shelf life, and packaging integrity. Conversely, stackable, fried snack chips have just the opposite attributes. If a way were to be developed by which snack chips could be commercially and efficiently produced which had the desirable attributes of both the baked and the fried products, a distinct advance would be made in this very mature industry. Accordingly, it is to the provision of such that the present invention is primarily directed.